Gender, Caste, and Class in South India's Technical Institutions - Hardcover

by Nandini Hebbar N. (Author)

With a wide arc encompassing the institutional big men, who run technical institutes and colleges, and the micro-politics of friendships and relationships, this book is a deep dive into the world of Indian engineering colleges. It juxtaposes the stark realities and lived experiences of students against the global sensibilities and standards to which such institutes lay claim. From the 1980s to the early 2000s, Tamil Nadu witnessed a record rise in the number of private engineering colleges. However, despite the manifold increase in the number of institutions and consequently, first-generation learners, hierarchies and inequalities continue to be reproduced in these almost temple-like institutions. Groups lacking the explicit markers of cultural and social capital struggle to find employment. By presenting perspectives on engineering students desires, anxieties, and processes of self-construction, the monograph examines how gender differences are reinforced through language, rules, regulations, surveillance, and control. In shifting the theoretical emphasis from subjects to subjectivities, Hebbar draws on the youths narratives of upward social mobility, crafting respectability, and notions of adulthood, holding a mirror to the fraught social scape of Indias private education sector.

Author Biography

Nandini Hebbar N.

Dr Nandini Hebbar N. is an independent researcher based in Ahmedabad, India. She obtained her PhD from the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics. Her articles have appeared in journals such as SAMAJ, SubVersions, and Studies in South Asian Film and Media. She won the Vina Mazumdar Memorial Fund - Indian Association for Women's Studies (VMMF-IAWS) Young Research Scholars' Award for the year 2019.